|
|
|
FEAR, HATRED AND THE HIDDEN INJURIES OF CLASS IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND
| By Andy Wood |
University of East Anglia |
Class struggle ... is a fight for the crude and material things without which no refined and spiritual things could exist. But these latter things, which are present in class struggle, are not present as a vision of spoils that fall to the victor. They are alive in this struggle as confidence, courage, humour, cunning, and fortitude, and have effects that to reach far back into the past.
|
| H. Eiland and M.W. Jennings (eds.) Walter Benjamin: selected writings. Volume 4, 1938–1940 4 vols. (Cambridge, Mass., 2003), 390. |
|
|
The most potent weapon of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed Steve Biko, quoted in D. Barsamian (ed.), Propaganda and the public mind: conversations with Noam Chomsky (London, 2001), 165.
|
|
|
| |
|
|
I
|
|
|
Historical assessments of social relations in early modern England have often extrapolated from expressions of plebeian contempt for their rulers. The Wapping mariner who "'cared not a fart for the king" and Joan Hoby of Colnbrook (Buckinghamshire) who "did not care a pin nor a fart for my Lord's Grace of Canterbury [i.e., Archbishop Laud] ... and ... did hope that she should live to see him hanged" both suggest that the labouring people of early modern England frequently rejected the passive deference expected of them by their rulers.1 Social historians often balance such exclamations against evidence of popular deference, thereby concluding that early modern society sat uneasily between a status-based 'society of orders' and a modern class society.2 But what are historians of social relations to make of such outbursts? Do they represent the main, or even the only, plebeian reaction to authority?3 Should historians be forced into a choice: deference or defiance? Or should we analyse these two extremes in relationship to one another, studying the friction between deference and defiance?4 This paper will make a case for the latter approach. In particular, it will develop Keith Snell's insight that "Deferential attitudes become a manner, one side of an habitual double-faced outlook, a form of self-presentation. They were buttoned in as a necessity for survival."5 |
1
|
|
The title of this essay borrows shamelessly from that classic piece of radical sociology, Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb's Hidden Injuries of Class, published back in 1972. The essay itself extends the growing rehabilitation of class as an analytical category in early modern history.6 In this first section, recent postmodernist approaches to class are summarised, and their usefulness for the interpretation of class in early modern England is explored. In the second section of the essay, the concept of class is shown to have a utility in the explanation of hitherto neglected aspects of early modern social relations. In a long third section, class categories are deployed in a more detailed assessment of the place of fear, deference, anger and hatred in early modern social relations. |
. . . |
There are about 11598 more words in this article.
Please log in (or, if you are not yet an
authorized user, please go to the
User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
|
